Upon hearing NPR‘s “rewriting of the history of the Vietnam War” by reporting that the U.S. commander in Vietnam, Gen. Creighton Abrams, used tactics in which “the important thing isn’t enemy body count; it’s protecting the population, training local Vietnamese forces, providing money and programs for a better life,” blogging critic Mytwords (NPR Check, 10/31/08) promptly
went to the library and found Fire in the Lake, where Frances Fitzgerald writes on page 405: “Abrams…diverted the American forces…to an all-out attempt to destroy enemy base areas…. Under the Accelerated Pacification Campaign, the U.S. Ninth Division almost literally ‘cleaned out’ the Front-held regions…bombing villages, defoliating crops, and forcing the peasants to leave their lands.”…
It definitely wasn’t about “protecting the population.” [NPR reporter Tom] Bowman also doesn’t mention that one side of the Abrams… strategy was the bloody Phoenix Program. In Fire in the Lake, you can also read how under Abrams in 1969, the United States set a goal for the Phoenix Program to ‘neutralize’ 20,000 [North Vietnamese] National Liberation Front agents during the year. Of the 19,534 people reported “neutralized” that yea,r torture was systemic and one third were dead (page 412).
NPR‘s government-friendly take is just a small part of the regrettably long corporate reporting tradition on that war; see FAIR’s magazine Extra!: How the New York Times Blew My Lai: What if a Massacre Had Been Covered When It Mattered? (11-12/03) by John L. Hess
“How the New York Times Blew My Lai”
You know … words are important.
Duh.
So when the corpress is said to have “blown” something (other than smoke), it gives the impression of an honest, if incompetent, mistake having been made … rather than a wilful attempt to conceal the truth.
Is that what you think happened here, and as a matter of course?
I’ve been reading and watching these bastards for decades … it’s not the empirical conclusion I come to.
National Propaganda Radio strikes again. Brought to you by the Ford Foundation and Archer Daniels Midland.
NPR and NYT are never around to blow the lid off current massacres. They seem to believe that a whitewash job, dumping facts down the memory hole, months, years or decades later vindicating the “winners” in massacres, is all that needs to be done.
Give me Democracy Now and Taking Aim any day over these corporate media mouthpieces.
Thanks for the great new blog, FAIR!
Incredible blog post.